This invention relates generally to automated customer management, and in particular to the automated management of customer incident reports in a social network system.
Social networking systems allow users to create accounts that are tied to their identities, and to interact with their friends, acquaintances, family members, and co-workers through a common platform. A social networking system may also allow businesses to offer goods and services, both real and virtual, to users of the social networking system. In addition, a social networking system may enable users to market their own goods and services directly, or indirectly, to other members of the social networking system.
Interactions between users, or between users and businesses, may result in customer incident reports that require the involvement of the social networking system. Customer incident reports are generated when customers require interaction with an automated system or human agent, e.g. in order to report a faulty transaction, dispute a charge, lodge a complaint, request a remedial action, make inquiries, etc. However, the process for using social networking system information to resolve customer incident reports is currently resource intensive. Although human agents can be used to sift through the social data to determine information that is relevant to a customer incident report, such a use of human agents is expensive since the volume of customer incident reports can grow very large as a social network's user base increases into millions and hundreds of millions.
What is required is an automated system that can utilize social data to help resolve customer incident reports. However, the types of customer incident reports that can be generated as a result of transactions between users, or between users and businesses, can be very large. For example, customer incident reports may be generated due to fraud, faulty products, misplaced orders, mistyped shipping information, harassment, spam, and more. As a result, using engineering resources to program a separate automated solution for each customer incident report type can itself be resource intensive.